tm ^ mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 




meSm 



THOUGHTS 

of a RECLUSE 



BY 



AUSTIN O'MALLEY, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D. 



(( Nee aranearum sane texus ideo melior quia ex se fila gignunt, 
nee noster vilior quia ex alienis libamus ut apes?^ 

Justus Lipsius, Monti. Polti. 



CHICAGO AKRON, O. NEW YORK 

D. H. MCBRIDE & COMPANY 



C«+*J* 






^ 



8/84 



Copyright, ii 



BY 



D. H. McBride & Company 




TWO G( 



LCtlVED. 



2nd CO; 
1898. 



CONTENTS 
• 

PAGE 

Social Life ..... 5 

Parents and Children . 23 

Art, Literature and Beauty 31 

Love and Friendship 63 

Charity, Obedience, Humility 69 

Patience and Sorrow . 79 

God and Religion 87 



SOCIAL LIFE 



SOCIAL LIFE 



jNE advantage a democracy has over a mon- 
archy is that there is more wisdom in a 
hundred fools than in one. 

* * * 

A gentleman very seldom meets rude persons. 

* * * 

The people that enjoy the greatest political lib- 
erty often suffer from the most abject spiritual 

slavery. 

* * * 

Some men are like a church-organ — you can play 
on them for a lifetime and always find new tunes; 
others are like a music-box — they have four or five 

shallow jingles. 

* * * 

When a child has grown tired of a rubber bal- 
loon he thrusts a pin into it to hear the explosion. 
Death will do the same thing with your life, and 
the explosion will be the obituary notice in your 
local newspaper. The bigger the balloon the louder 
the explosion, but it's all a matter of gas. 

7 



8 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Sterne well said : (< So-and-so is my friend, but 

Truth is my sister. B 

* * * 

In the process of making- a gentleman, the last 
flaw that is ground out of the soul is a tendency 
toward familiarity with those he loves. 

* * * 

Vanity is as universal as fingers. When Solo- 
mon wrote his dissertation on vanity he would 
have been deeply grieved if a critic had censured 
the style of the discourse. 

* * * 

If you would know a young man's character find 
out where he builds his air-castles. 

* * * 

Why do we use the simile, <( blind as a bat," which 
is not blind, instead of (< blind as vanity, ® which is 

altogether eyeless ? 

* * * 

When an old man points out to youth that all 
flowers are weeds, this old man thinks he is citing 
the authority of experience, but in every case he 
is really expressing his own feelings in the pres- 
ent. Experience after all is not the best teacher. 
We grow physically unfit for certain sorts of fool- 
ishness, and then we prate about experience and 
wisdom. Experience is useful only in cases where 
passion does not enter. 



SOCIAL LIFE 9 

We are very like a dog running in a treadmill. 
The poor beast strives upward fawning and whin- 
ing but he never advances, and if he rests he is 
hurled backward and bruised. While off the mill 
he snaps at flies till Death snaps at him, and makes 
of him food to fatten weeds. 

* * * 

They often say woman cannot keep a secret, 
but every woman in the world, like every man, 
has a hundred secrets in her own soul which she 
hides from even herself. The more respectable 
she is the more certain it is the secrets exist. 

* * * 

Many noble thoughts that are commonly classi- 
fied as effects of the Sermon on the Mount were 
known to rational men before the time of our 
Lord. Plato, in the 'Crito,* makes Socrates say: 
(< We must never retaliate by doing evil for evil ; 
and we must never injure any man, though we 
may suffer ever so great injury from him." No 
one, however, heeded these thoughts until our Lord 
clothed them with light. 

* * * 

A man's life is like a well, not like a snake — it 
should be measured by its depth, not by its length. 

* * * 

There is no incognito so skilfully kept as that 
of the just woman. 



io THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Any black key on a piano may he a sharp or a 
flat. Chanon said, (< the first sigh of love is the 
last of wisdom " — arna?ites, amentes. The same 
west wind that in May flows musically through 
the oak's new buds, in December snarls across the 
bare boughs and hisses on the sere leaves; and 
how different is the same voice of the world in 
our glorious summer and in the winter of our dis- 
content. 

* * * 

It is an ill wind that blows no good — on the 
sigh of the orphan is wafted skill to the young 
surgeon, said a mediaeval proverb. 

* * * 

A hundred suns go to redden one poor rose, 
God's blood to save a slime-dweller's soul; a life's 
pain and toil are paid for a short flash of honor as 
valuable as an angry woman's reason, and whole 
nations have been annihilated because some king's 
dyspepsia bothered the rascal. We usually pay 
large prices for cheap commodities despite the 
chatter of the political economists. 

* * * 

We swell out our breasts and say we are in 
manly pursuit of glory, when God knows we are 
puppies chasing our own tails, till Death grows 
tired of the farce and knaps us o' the coxcombs 
with his flail, crying, (( down, wantons, down ! B and 
the show is ended. 



SOCIAL LIFE II 

A common sop to one's conscience is to grow 
eloquent over the short-comings of the clergy, but 
it is doubtful if God will judge us by what the 

clergy do. 

* * ♦ 

Life differs from the drama and romance in this 
that the denouement of life is always death, never 

a marriage. 

* * * 

Life is a process of weaning in which the nurse 

is seldom successful. 

* * * 

The difference between a human being ten years 
of age and one fifty years of age lies altogether in 

the matter of toys. 

* * ♦ 

If you would avoid all fools go into a dense 
forest and there refrain from gazing into still 

pools. 

* * * 

A man morally small resembles a statue in this 
respect: the higher he is elevated the more he 
dwindles. There are men that do well enough on 
the ground; but if they are set on a lofty pedestal, 
we cannot for the life of us determine whether 
they are men or monkeys. 

* * * 

We should thank God that He did not give us u 
the power of hearing through walls; otherwise 
there would be no such thing as friendship. 



12 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Vox populi, vox Dei, is perhaps the falsest and 
the most blasphemous aphorism used by the news- 
papers. 

* * * 

The weaker a man in authority, layman, or cleric, 
the stronger his insistence that all his privileges be 
acknowledged. A strong man needs no crutches. 

* * * 

Cicero said: ^Libertas est potestas faciendi id 
quod jure lieeat* ; man usually thinks liberty is 
the power of doing what he likes to do. That 

is license. 

* * * 

(( We are grains of incense, }> said Marcus Au- 
relius, and we are burned in the thurible that 
Death the priest swings before the altar of God. 
Does one grain say to another: (< I am better than 

thou » ? 

* * * 

Despise no man, since every one has his place 
in God's design. A sheet of brown paper may be 
better as a wrapper for a loaf of bread than a 
page from Homer, and we must sometimes carry 

home bread. 

* * * 

The American word <( bluff >} is so expressive 
that it is not only r a complete library of biog- 
raphy, but also a history of collegiate education in 
the United States. 



SOCIAL LIFE 



The habits of a young man are like his coat, 
removable; the habits of an old man are like the 

drapery of a statue. 

* * * 

If wise men were hairs how bald a pate this 
old world would now have. 

* * * 

Liberty has as many chains as slavery, but the 
golden chains of liberty decorate, and the iron 
chains of slavery degrade. 

* * * 

The antivivisectionist is a childless matron or a 
male or female old maid whose heart is too big 
to rest sweetly in the family cat. 

* * * 

The moralists teach us that love is the final end 
of every action, but they seem to forget that lib- 
erty is the practical end. 

* * ♦ 

There never was a great river into which no 
muddy Water ran, nor a great man that was alto- 
gether great. 

* * * 

Reformation is abstract and it lies in the next 
village ; a reformer is concrete and a pebble within 
our own shoe ; we love reformation and hate the 
reformer. 



i 4 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Thievery is like a cannibal that fattens a man 
for a while with the intention of eating him later 

on. 

* * * 

Give a loaded revolver to an infant and a vote 
to an ignorant man, and the second crime is worse 

than the first. 

* * * 

Democracy is government by the people, not by 
the off-scouring of the people. 

* * * 

The worst miser is the learned man that will 
not write. 

5}C SfC 5{C 

He was a cynical artist that first represented 
Justice in the form of a woman ; and why should 

he blindfold her ? 

* * * 

If you would know the world go into a desert 
and study your own heart. 

* * * 

Delicacy of conscience is intended solely for 

home use. 

* * * 

Civilization is the world in a nap. 

* * * 

Vinegar from a sweet wine and the anger of a 
good-natured man are very bitter. 



SOCIAL LIFE 15 

Corruptio optimi pesstma, — a patriot dead and 
rotten is a professional politician. 

* * ♦ 

A man's life in the world is like a bubble that 
arises in a lake. It glitters for an instant, bursts, 
and leaves no trace, — not even a blur on the water; 
or, it is like the leap of a minnow: it sends a tiny 
ripple atremble for a few feet, and then all is 

smooth again. 

* * * 

Self-defence is not the first law of nature, but 
of corrupt nature. If nature were not corrupt 
there would be no need of self-defence. 

* * * 

Do not offend a man that is a close observer, — 

he never forgets. 

* * * 

There is a Latin distich to this effect: What is 
more fickle than the wind ? — lightning. What than 
lightning? — fame. What than fame? — a woman. 
What than a woman? — nothing. The last answer 

should be, — a man. 

* * * 

hi omnibus requiem qucesivi is a true rule of life 
if you translate it, In all things I sought peace. 

* * * 

The Celt is the man that oftenest advances from 
peasant to half gentleman in the second generation. 



1 6 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

The great differences between peoples are not 
to be observed solely between distinct nations. 
The Prussian differs from the Bavarian, the Pied- 
montese from the Neapolitan, the Yankee from 
the Virginian, almost as much as the Russian dif- 
fers from the Turk. 

* * * 

a Great families last not three oaks," said Sir 
Thomas Browne. He should have said one oak. 
Great titles remain, the family changes. The Eng- 
lish title Albemarle, according to Victor Hugo, has 
been held by six succeeding families, that of Lei- 
cester by five, of Lincoln by six, and of Pem- 
broke by seven. 

* * * 

In James Puckle's (( Grey Cap for a Green Head w 
is a presentation of the saying, de mortuis nil nisi 
bonum, which delighted Poe for its literary form. 
It is this: (< In speaking of the dead, so fold up 
your discourse that their virtues may be shown out- 
wardly, while their vices are wrapped in silence. w 
It is said that O'Connell's translation of the aphor- 
ism was: (( As each great rogue departs let all the 
rest deplore him." O'Connell's version is better 
in many cases than is Puckle's. It is an abuse of 
fair play to let a scoundrel escape merely because 
he lies where insolence is powerless. One might 
as well be gentle with him because he happened 
to be in jail. 



SOCIAL LIFE 17 

Our lives are waves that come up out of the 
ocean of eternity, break upon the beach of earth, 
and lapse back to the ocean of eternity. Some 
are sunlit, some run in storm and rain; one is a 
quiet ripple, another is a thunderous breaker; and 
once in many centuries comes a great tidal wave 
that sweeps over a continent; but all go back to 
the sea and lie equally level there. 

* * * 

Life is a charity ball given by the leaders of 
society. A few dance, get their charity's worth to 
the last penny, and the poor stand outside the 
gate and watch with hungry eyes the glint of 
jewels in the warm air. Then comes the lackey 
Death and he says : C( Madame and my Master, your 
carriage waits. J) So you go away into the dark 
and the dancing continues. 

* * * 

The largest, the oldest, and the greatest single 
family in the world is the Hebrew people. Those 
of pure blood are the descendants of one glorious 
saint, Abraham. They have produced the Blessed 
Virgin and Judas. Their existence to-day is a 
miracle, and the origin in some poet's brain of the 
legend of the Wandering Jew. Their persecutors 
pass away, but the Jew lives on and waxes stronger. 
He is a natural figure of the Church in this par- 
ticular. 

2— T. R. 



1 8 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Our memories are record-books good enough for 
the fair deeds done us, but the injuries done us 
we engrave on brass. 

* * * 

There are two classes of tramps — the one well 
known to the police, and the other not so well 
known. The second is the moral tramp or the 
idle (( gentleman. }) This latter, the baser rascal, 
is on the town, supported morally by an impatient 
community, but he should be in the workhouse. 

* * * 

The difference between a respectable citizen and 
most professional patriots or chronic politicians is 
like the difference between silver and quicksilver, 
— if you put your finger on silver you have a 
valuable article under it, if you try to put your 
finger on quicksilver you have nothing under it. 

* * * 

Americans are charged with lack of reverence, 
but it is nearer the truth to say that they like 
to stick a bodkin into an inflated lie. If parent, 
teacher, governor, or priest is worthy of reverence 
in himself, he gets it in the United States as 
quickly and as tenderly as in any country on 
earth; if he is not worthy of it, he gains little by 
putting an imposing mask before his face and cry- 
ing booh! at the people here. This is a question 
of fact, not one of morality. 



SOCIAL LIFE 19 

The influence of England upon the United States 
is not an influence of blood, but of inherited laws 
and customs which is a deeper influence than that 
of blood, — a little yeast leavening the whole mass. 
America is anything but Anglo-Saxon in blood, 
and not a little Anglo-Saxon in laws and customs. 
These customs govern even the Latin races that 
come to us. Our law-courts, our army and navy 
etiquette, our colleges, are English more or less. 
Our crime of permitting uneducated boys to begin 
the study of law and medicine, our gross feeding, 
our wastefulness, our hypocritical primness before 
the public when that public is powerful, our shut 
doors and shut pianos on Sunday, are modern 
English. The American's stubborn insistence upon 
individual liberty from purely selfish motives, which 
selfishness does not hesitate to deny that liberty to 
foreigners by birth or creed and to the minority 
which differs from us in religion, as the Puritan 
denied it, is modern English. 

* * # 

There have been men that were heroes not only 
to their valets but to their widows. 

* * # 

Murder one man and you will be hanged, mur- 
der a million men and the kinsmen of this million 
will erect marble statues to you; steal a loaf of 
bread and you will be sent to prison, steal a con- 
tinent and you will be worshipped as a god. 



2 o THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

We oblige our clergymen, lawyers, physicians, 
soldiers, engineers, to study for some years and 
to pass examinations which prove fitness for their 
work before we allow them to deal with our lives 
and property; but what do we require from the 
men that make our laws ? We talk about the no- 
bility of obedience to law, and we let the profes- 
sional politician make the law. We entrust the 
safety of our property, children, civilization to 
ballot-buyers. We write impassioned words about 
human slavery, the negro, the Armenian, and we 
ourselves obey dramshop aldermen. Any one can 
be a patriot in time of war, but wars are scarce 
in America, and we need more patriotism in time 

of peace. 

* * * 

Suppose a miracle brought Solomon on earth 
again, and we were to ask him these questions: 

(( O King, live for ever, what thinkest thou of 
woman's suffrage ? w 

(< What dost thou mean ? }) 

<( I mean that woman should vote for rulers. }) 

« Vote for rulers ? What is that ? » 

<( Nowadays, O King, we cast into urns the writ- 
ten names of certain men from the people, and he 
whose name is written oftenest is chosen ruler in 
the land for a season. 

<( Have ye no king ? w 

<( No, — we have politicians instead. w 

<( And ye cast ballots for these politicians ? >} 



SOCIAL LIFE 21 

«Ay, O King\» 

(< Who are the electors ? }> 

"Anything that walks on two legs, except babes, 
monkeys, and fowls. The legs must be twenty-one 
years of age and not red nor yellow; there is no 
objection to blacklegs. B 

<( Your slaves ? )} 

<( Our slaves. — By the way we do not use that 
name at present. We keep up the state of slavery, 
of course, but we have abolished the name for 
sentimental reasons. }) 

(< And this woman's suffrage means that women 
also vote for rulers ! ® 

(( Even thus, O King, is it done in some of our 
provinces. }> 

«No! ,) 

«Yea, O King.» 

(< I say, no! Impossible ! • 

(< I say, yes ! w — 

(< Let me die again ! )} 



PARENTS AND CHILDREN 



23 



PARENTS AND CHILDREN 



fEARs over an erring child may be as useless as 
rain on uprooted corn. See, therefore, that 
the corn be not uprooted — keep out the hogs. 

* * * 

The child's obedience and the soldier's obedience 
should be the same, but there should be the ele- 
ment of love in the child's obedience. 

* * * 

A pebble can turn a river on the crest of the 
Alleghanies to the Mississippi or to the Atlantic, 
and a touch can turn a child's heart from the 

world to God. 

* * * 

Keep a child's heart so white that our Lady 
might walk across its snow without staining her 

sandal. 

* * * 

A man is made or unmade before his seventh 
year, and there is a special lower hell for fathers 
and mothers that have the (( yes-dear >} habit. 

25 



26 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Every child is a diamond in the rough, and if 
the adult shine dimly the fault lies with the par- 
ent who as gem-cutter shaped the facets igno- 

rantly or carelessly. 

* * * 

Letting a boy have his own way merely to 
keep him quiet is like giving a baby an open 
razor merely to keep it quiet, except that the first 
crime is more brutal than the second. 

* * * 

It is less difficult to understand the priest that 
handles the body of Christ thoughtlessly than the 
father or mother that handles a child's soul thought- 
lessly. The priest can repent and repair, the father 
and mother can only repent. 

* * ♦ 

A very homely cygnet may become a very beau- 
tiful swan; — it is neither kind nor wise to slight 

a boy. 

* * * 

A father that thinks his duty consists in bread- 
winning alone, is very ignorant. Bread-winning 
is altogether a secondary duty. 

* * * 

It is a popular error to think that the children 
of holy parents often are bad, because we are lia- 
ble to mistake the church-going habit in parents 
for sanctity. 



PARENTS AND CHILDREN 27 

A little girl, eight years of age, toiling irr a 
New England mill, was asked : <( Who made you w ? 
She answered, <( God. w c( Why did He make you"? 
She answered, <( To work w ! That was a bitter re- 
sponse, but there was much truth in it. 

* * * 

We are told to honor father and mother, and 
this law can be obeyed; but we cannot love par- 
ents unless they have striven to merit love. Natu- 
ral resentment of parental harshness has often 
been mistaken for ingratitude. 

* * * 

Every street has many parents, but there is 
only a handful of fathers and mothers in a city. 

* * ♦ 

Parents may toil in bitterness for years to clothe 
and feed a child and to pay school-bills; but if 
they have not won the child's love they have done 

nothing. 

* * ♦ 

There are three men in the world that should 
never show natural anger — a judge, a school- 
master, and a father. 



Children should be taught the nobility of obe- 
dience. Voluntary obedience to law is one of the 
greatest privileges of man. 



28 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Many a child has been spoiled by too much 
governing; but a worse fault in parents is to com- 
mand twice. Orders should not be given thought- 
lessly, but when rightly given it is criminal in 

parents to yield. 

* * * 

If the history of a family in which insanity has 
appeared is traced back for two or three genera- 
tions, one nearly always finds a parent that fre- 
quently yielded to temptations to anger or impurity, 
or to gluttony in meat or drink. 

* * * 

A house-kitten and a tiger are both cats, and a 
baby's pout and the murderer's rage are both an- 
ger. The kitten will not become a tiger, but the 
baby's rage can readily become the murderer's 
rage. Then God asks the parents : <( Why did 

you permit this w ? 

* * * 

Judge a man in his everyday work; judge a 
child in his play. 

A parent that beats an erring child to-day is a 
bully that maltreats a weaker human being for a 
malfeasance in office of which he himself was 

guilty a year ago. 

* * * 

The boy is beginning manhood that can shut 
his teeth against an escaping thought. 



PARENTS AND CHILDREN 29 

The cause of failure in school-teachers is that 
many men and women mistake what is a mission 
from God for a trade. 

* * * 

There is some truth in the assertion of modern 
criminologists that crime is hereditary: it descends 
upon children from the moral atony of parents. 

* * ♦ 

An unmarried man is a person with one soul to 
save; a father is a man with two or more souls 
to save. 

You and I have very sound notions concerning 
the discipline of our neighbors' children. 

♦ * * 

If children were taught the lore of obedience, 
and if they put into practice this beautiful science, 
there would be no police nor lawyers in the world, 
and even the confessional might be filled with cob- 
webs. 

♦ ♦ * 

When one considers the responsibilities of par- 
ents, it would seem that only carefully educated 
men and women should marry. It does not, how- 
ever, require genius to raise children. Holiness in 
the parent is all that is necessary; but it requires 
as much holiness to fulfil the obligations of a 
father or a mother as to observe those of a priest 
or a nun. 



3o 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



Plutarch said ( ( De Educat. Puer.,* cap. xix.)-. 
{< The essential things in the education of the 
young are to teach them to worship the gods, to 
revere their parents, to honor their elders, to obey 
the laws, to submit to rulers, to love their friends, 
to be temperate. w These, strange to say, are just 
the branches of learning the modern <( education * 

ignores. 

* # * 

Most modern school-teachers are like boys that 
trample a thousand blades of growing wheat in 
gathering one poor, useless corn-flower. 

* ♦ * 

We show reverence to old age when we should 
show it to childhood. 

* * * 

After one impure book a child's soul is like a 
blossoming rose-tree uprooted. 

* * * 

There are parents that nag at children half a 
lifetime and then have the stupendous shameless- 
ness to call this <( salutary correction ® and (< an ef- 
fect of love * ! Izaak Walton, in ( The Complete 
Angler, > also said : (< Thus use your frog : put your 
hook, I mean the arming wire, through his mouth, 
and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and 
silk sew the upper part of his leg with only one 
stitch to the arming wire of your hook, . . . and 
in so doing use him as though you loved him.* 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 



31 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 



fpHAT art is best which suggests most. Art is 
gRf like a tone, which is always made up of a 
fundamental note with its true harmonics and over- 
harmonics out to immensity. 

* * * 

There is no difficulty in defining poetry, — it is 
merely an expression of the beautiful in rhythmical 
language ; but what is beauty ? 

* * * 

When an artist sees the full countenance of Con- 
tent, like the head of the Gorgon, it strikes him 
into stone. 

The poet is not only a seer and a maker, he is 
also God's almoner of the beautiful for us that sit 

without the gates. 

* * * 

Cardan ( ( Prudentia Civilis,* cap. xc.) says: (< In 
universum nil prosunt literae ni tympanum pulset 
aliquis." Behold the fundamental notion for the 
book-reviewer's existence ! 

3— T. R. 33 



34 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



The perfect critic is one, as Sir Boyle Roche 
would say, that sees with the eyes of posterity. 



* * * 

What a philosopher thinks, and how a poet 

thinks, interest us. 

* # # 

The critic is often the conscience of the literary 
family and the artist is obliged to be the agent ; 
just as in the ordinary family the wife is com- 
monly the conscience and the husband is the 
agent. These critical and wifely consciences are 
very sensitive precisely because they need not be- 
come agents. 

* * * 

Musical expression is like the misty outline of 
Milton's imagery; poetical expression is like the 
clear-cut imagery of Dante. 

* * * 

Reliability in art and the golden-rod bloom late 
in summer. 

Behind my dwelling is a small lake, which in 
the day holds the sun and clouds, and in the night 
it holds the moon and a million white worlds; but 
it is not so deep as a poet's heart. 

* ♦ * 

A poem sings with a bad accent in any language 
not its own. 



ART, LITERATURE AXD BEAUTY 35 

Men shoot plunderers of the dead on the battle- 
field ; but we praise our authors that plunder the 
dead, since we do not know enough to recognize 
the theft. 

The most sorrowful poem, except Lear, ever 
written, and one of the noblest, is the Book of 

Job. 

* * ♦ 

Mr. William Watson writes: — 

« I close your Marlowe's page, my- Shakspere's ope, 
How welcome — after gong and cymbal din — 
The continuity, the long, slow slope. 

And vast curves of the gradual violin ! » 

What would he have said had he been forced to 
read the fashionable novel and then been given 
Shakspere as a relief ? 

* * * 

You must use a bit to make a safe man, a safe 
artist, and a safe horse. 

* * * 

We go to a book as Narcissus went to the 
fountain, — see ourselves therein, and are enam- 
ored. 

* * * 

A translation of a poem is like a plastercast 
of a statue or a photograph of a painting; and 

the better the translation the poorer the original 
poem. 



36 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Our critics, almost without exception, defend 
certain poets and novelists, who, though impure, 
have something that is beautiful in their minds ; 
but if you cut open a goat and find his belly 
stuffed with rosebuds is the beast any the less a 

goat ? 

* * * 

Poets and novelists speak eloquently of the 
awful mystery of life. There is no mystery in life 
except when sin clouds the light. Love God and 
every world-mystery will vanish. 

* * * 

The artist is often the first to forget that the 
sole material he is allowed to use is the beautiful. 
He may go into the hospital, prison, slum, in the 
search for that, but he must not bring back filth 
and call it beauty, much less may he call it art. 

* * * 

If you would keep your artistic faculties keen 
for production and judgment do not chop flesh 
with them. Plotinus said: (< A soul not beautiful 
cannot attain to the intuition of beauty. }) 

* * * 

The creations of some dramatists are mere works 
of art, those of Shakspere are personal friends or 
enemies. Lear is more real than Washington. 

* * * 

The essayist is an artisan that can gild old silver. 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 37 

Small poets set their poems against a melan- 
choly background as goldsmiths set cheap jewels 
against black velvet — to get contrast-accentuation. 

* ♦ ♦ 

A book is very like a money-changer: it pays 
you back in another form what you bring to it. 

* * * 

A man who holds that bread and butter and a 
home are necessary or even worth thinking about 
will never become a great artist. 

* * * 

Beauty is truth and goodness, crowned with 
flowers or with thorns, and hovering above the 
earth just beyond our touch; but many of our 
artists think that beauty is life and sense, crowned 
with flowers or with thorns, and walking upon the 

earth. 

* * * 

Style is not the gold setting of the diamond, 
thought; it is the glitter of the diamond itself. 

* 45 * 

The poet and the saint are both artists; the 
former consciously pursues his ideal, the latter un- 
consciously possesses his ideal. 

* * * 

The ideal is the real seen from the foretop be- 
fore it rises for the man on deck, and softened 
and enlarged in a mist of distance. 



3 8 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

All <( tillers of paper » sow old grain for seed, 
but there is a vast difference between the hus- 
bandman that labors with the tilth and a crow 
that carries off the corn, between the scholar and 

the plagiarist. 

* * * 

It is curious to note the rhythmical flow of the 
tides of passion in a Shaksperian play. Lear and 
Othello pass from crest to hollow as regularly as 
a sea wave. There is a similar rhythm in wars, 
epidemics, fashions in dress, and fashions in art- 
criticism. 

* * * 

Some men's brains are so badly crowded with 
books that nothing can move therein. 

* * * 

Shakspere is the only English poet that has 
created a perfect man, like the good Kent, for 
example. Milton's man would have the flaw of 
bigotry, Shelley's would be morbid, Wordsworth's 
would lack Christianity, Byron's would be tinged 
with sensual selfishness, Coleridge would never be 
completed, Keats's would be a (< cad }> like Por- 
phyrio, Tennyson's would be intolerably pale like 
Arthur, Browning's would be cynical, and so on. 

* * * 

When we talk about the dearth of poets we for- 
get that every mother is a poet for her babe. 



ART LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 



39 



The worst effect of literary fiction is that it 
makes us demand perfection in others rather than 

in ourselves. 

* * * 

All that is good in modern civilization is an 
effect of man's instinctive sense of the ideal work- 
ing in an atmosphere of Christianity; and the 
idealism of Him whose kingdom is not of this 
world is the cause of the fecundity of Christianity. 
The ideal in art is the vital fusion of what is 
best in many beautiful things, the ideal in sanc- 
tity is the result of the vital fusion of what is 
best in many moral things. In each case the 
ideal is the highest reality, as Christ our ideal is 

the highest reality. 

* * * 

The rationally agreeable is often beautiful, but 
not always so. The irrationally agreeable is never 
beautiful. Complacency in the irrationally agree- 
able is never art. 

* * * 

Poetry seems to be like the wild deer: as civi- 
lization advances both withdraw, and we find the 
poor tame substitute. 

* * * 

Sense is good in itself, but deordination, setting 
sense in the first place, is sin in morals and art. 
The strange part of this truism is that it has 
ceased to be a truism. 



4 o THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

A cause of failure with many artists is that they 
feed their minds with pastry and sugar instead of 

bread and meat. 

* * * 

Artists, naturally eager, leap to conclusions; 
they have not patience to take the intermediate 
steps. There is, therefore, a tendency to study 
the art of beauty to the neglect of the science of 
beauty; and this neglect makes the art of beauty 
weaker than it would otherwise be. 

* * * 

If realism is art, let us crown the camera and 
the barrel of plaster-of-paris. 

* * * 

A poet carrying a thought from his mind into 
expression is like a child bearing a bucket brim- 
ming with water from the well to the house, — 
part of the contents is spilled. 

* * * 

The highest beauty has the quality of strength, 
hence it is masculine. The greatest sculptors made 
it masculine, almost without exception. The first 
characteristic of even the Venus of Milo is power. 

* * * 

The ultimate atoms of every material thing are 
in proportion, and there is beauty wherever pro- 
portion exists. 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 41 

The legend of Proteus must have originated in 
the mind of one that had perceived the wonder- 
fully varied effects the same work of art produces 
on different observers. 

* * * 

The true criticism of Shakspere and of Dante 
has not yet begun. Critics grow drunk with the 
strength of the wine and praise foolishly instead 
of justly; or they cry out in their own maudlin 
voices and assure us that Shakspere and Dante 

are speaking. 

* * * 

A small poet is like a clock: he is constantly 

repeating himself. 

* * * 

Dante is a great storm-cloud: lightning and rain 
below, sunshine above. 

* * * 

A classic author is often a mummified writer 
who has been set up as a quintain against which 
only the mightier critics tilt. 

* * * 

One quality that sets Shakspere as an artist 
above Isaiah, ^Eschylus, Dante, Michel Angelo, and 
Beethoven, is his silent peace. He is like a still 
top of an Alpine peak where no footprint stains the 
eternal snow. He is almost as peaceable as Saint 
Thomas Aquinas. 



42 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



A grave error in Shaksperian criticism is to 
consider Hamlet or any other character as reflec- 
tions of the master's own mind. 

* * * 

Goethe is like an aula maxima in a German 
university decorated with copies of ancient Greek 

statues. 

* * * 

The age of the epic had passed in England even 
before Chaucer's time and it will never return 
unless civilization is destroyed and started toward 
reconstruction. The ( Nibelungenlied > was the last 
northern epic. ( Paradise Lost } is a beautiful but 
defective modern restoration of an epic, a model 
to be kept in a museum; the real epic was for 

practical use. 

* * * 

Coventry Patmore was a golden eagle blinded 
in one eye. He could soar against the sun but 
he could not see on both sides of his gyre. 

* * * 

One of the books seen by Pantagruel in the 
Library of Saint Victor's was a (< Qusestio Subtilis- 
sima — utrum Chimsera in Vacuo Bombinans Possit 
Comedere Secundas Intentiones w (whether a Chi- 
msera booming around in a vacuum could eat sec- 
ond intentions). This would serve as title for 
nine-tenths of the books published at present. 



ART LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 



43 



Atmosphere is everything to a small artist; some 
men would paint perfectly in heaven. The real 
artist, however, can work in a factory. 

* * * 

No painter can produce the light and shadow 
of nature in the pitch of the original model; he 
therefore begins in a lower key. The same law 
holds in sanctity when we would copy Christ in 
our souls; but a mistake we always make is that 
our key is too low, or if we take the proper key 
we do not finish the picture. 

* * * 

The class of idolaters never diminishes; it 
merely changes images and ceremonial. Natural 
man tends toward the concrete, the palpable, the 
physically visible; — hence our idolaters as well as 
our artists. Plutus, Venus, Mercury, Mars, have 
no incense, at so much the ounce, burned before 
their statues, but that is the only change in their 
cult. To-day, as of old, the flesh is visible, the 
spirit is heard of as if by letter from across seas. 

* * * 

True critics, like poets, are born and partly 
made — ars est homo additus Natures — but the 
natural critic and the natural poet are musicians 
that play by ear, or they are silver in the ore 
which must be refined before it becomes useful. 

« Qui Pythia cantat, 
Tibicen didicit prius, extimuitque magistrum." 



44 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



God is too true a poet to make ugliness when 
He was free to make beauty. It is strange that 
one hears the exclamation, (< Oh, how beautiful ! * 
coming from the heart oftener in the pathological 
laboratory than in the artist's studio; and there is 
no beauty so deep, so sweet, as the beauty of 
Death. (( Blessed be God for our sister, the Death 
of the body, w said Francis of Assisi. We do not 
understand; we dread in our childishness the kiss 
of God through the dark. 

* * * 

A remarkable vagary of modern criticism is the 
serious dispute concerning morality in art. That 
is not an open question. We must require the 
same morality in art that we require in a woman, 
and this entirely for aesthetic reasons. Immorality 
is not beauty, and art has nothing to do with any- 
thing which is not beautiful. This is not a limita- 
tion of art, because beauty is everywhere, from the 
light on a child's forehead up to its source in God. 

* * * 

We make pleasure and use our own in youth, 
we make charity and art our own after mid-life. 
He is a holy man that is charitable before his 
thirty-fifth year, because charity is a noble wisdom 
in which sorrowful experience is vivified by grace 
and magnanimity. Art before mid-life is often 
affectation, for a human soul is very slowly solu- 
ble in beauty. 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 45 

If you doubt that truth is necessary to beauty 
as an object of art, consider your sentiments in 
the presence of a clever actor. The faintest infi- 
delity to absolute truth in the actor's reproduction 
of nature is noticeable, and if the actor is excel- 
lent his slight flaws grow painful to us as are dis- 
cords in music. This is an outcome of an innate 
fitness for truth, which we cannot control more 
than we can control the circulation of the blood. 
What we call depth of passion in a player is 
merely another name for truth, for adequation be- 
tween what we see and what would be seen in 
nature. Surely beauty is the (( splendor of truth }) 
as it is perfected good. 

* * * 

Coventry Patmore wrote in ( Religio Poetse': 
(< Peace, which is as much above joy as joy is 
above pleasure . . . can scarcely be called emo- 
tion, since it rests, as it were, in final good, the 
primum mobile, which is without emotion. » If he 
had said it finally rests in the primum mobile, his 
words would be more convincing. There is ex- 
tremely deep emotion in the rising tide of Peace 
before that last flood is reached. The highest 
poetry and the highest sanctity consist in contem- 
plation with emotion. It is written in the ( Fio- 
retti y : <( Saint Francis remained until dawn ever 
repeating, ( My God ! My God ! > and no other 
word/ but Saint Francis wept all the while. 



46 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

A perfect prose expression is a reproduction of 
a thought in pastel; a perfect poetic expression of 
the same thought would be a reproduction in oil 
colors: or the prose expression of a thought is a 
translation into another language, the true poetic 
expression being the thought in its original tongue. 

* * * 

Small critics say that poetry is no longer valued. 
It is impossible for man not to be pleased with 
poetry, because this liking is grounded in his 
nature. These critics forget that a true poet 
comes among us only once in a generation, some- 
times not once in a century; and that certain civ- 
ilized nations never produce a great poet. We 
suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love 

for poetry. 

* * * 

There is no rest in creation, all is rhythm, or 
at least the unrest of change. In the interstellar 
spaces, where absolute zero may be and no pon- 
derable thing, ether vibrates rhythmically as heat 
vibrates in every thing on earth from fire to frost. 
And rhythm will last eternally. Before time was, 
God was in absolute rest as He alone now is. 
With His primal fiat, the instant He clothed in 
substance His first angel and called him good, or 
rather beautiful, harmonious unrest began, to go 
on forever. Beyond the farthest thought-journey 
of the oldest archangel there is neither rest nor 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 47 

unrest, only God; yet one day unrest will pass 
chiming in strange rhythm into this still darkness 
and beyond. When the ultimate star has cooled 
to disintegrating rest the vibrations of unrest will 
be but beginning, spreading out forever in the 
great concentric singing waves that God upheaved 
by His one whispered creative word. 

* * * 

The law of probability is the law most fre- 
quently broken in the modern novel and drama. 

* * * 

The more perfect the adequation between the 
beautiful image in the artist's mind and its ex- 
pression the higher the art produced, supposing the 
mental image to be beautiful. This adequation is 
truth; — hence the pleasure of the intellect in 
beauty. All beauty is truth, but all truth is not 
beauty. Where falsehood enters beauty is defect- 
ive, exactly as truth would be defective. 

* * * 

Lowell, in his ( Essay on Chaucer*, says that 
(( Art should be ( the world's sweet inn > whither 
we repair for refreshment and repose. }> The artist 
himself must not accept this assertion literally: if 
he looks upon art as a mere delight he will not 
rise above vulgarity. An ever-present dread of 
sacrilege is the only spirit that creates, except 
when the artist is magnificently endowed. 



4 8 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Walt Whitman was the last of the Centaurs, — 
half man and half beast. 

* * * 

You cannot produce art nor judge art if your 
eye is dimmed with sense. There is a glib saying, 
invented by the devil and used by his servants, — 
<( A11 things are pure to the pure of heart. M The 
correct text is: All things are pure to the pure of 
heart for about five minutes. Art deals with 
beauty, and sensuality is not beauty, no matter 
how cleverly it is gilded. 

* * * 

It needs no demonstration to establish the tru- 
ism that beauty which approaches nearest God's 
beauty is the highest beauty. His essence is the 
ultimate measure of beauty as of truth and good- 
ness. There is no question here of the beauty 
that pleases most the human compound, but of 
the beauty that actually ranks first. While we are 
in the body we must use the body; we are too 
weak to rest sweetly in the keen upper air of the 
intellectual, of the spiritual, but beauty is there 
as in its home. In these valleys we forever mis- 
take the agreeable for the beautiful. <( The true 
order of going or of being led by others to the 
things of love," said Plato, in the Symposium/ 
(< is to use the beauties of earth as steps, along 
which we mount upward for the sake of the higher 
beauty. >} 



ART LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 



49 



The great historian goes before the tomb and 
cries : (< Lazarus, come forth )} ! and the dead arises. 



^ ^ ^ 

It is strange what a liking the poets have had 
for this thought, which Tennyson, in ( Locksley 
Hall ) used last : — 

K A sorrow's crown of sorrows 
Is remembering happier things." 

Shelley ( ( Prometheus Unbound,* act ii., sc. i) 
says : — 

H Thou comest as the memory of a dream 
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet." 

In Beaumont and Fletcher's ( Fair Maid of the 
Inn,* Baptista says: — 

« To have been happy, Madam, adds to calamity." 

Chaucer ( ( Troilus and Criseyde,* iii., 1625) has 
it: — 

8 For of fortunes sharp adversitee 

The worst kinde if infortune is this, 
A man to have been in prosperitee, 

And it remembren, whan it passed is." 

He takes the thought as if from Dante's words 
in the ( Inferno } (canto v.): — 

« Nessun maggior dolore 
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
Nella miseria." 

The original sentence, perhaps, was in Boethius' 
( De Consolatione Philosophise > (1. 2, pr. 4) : (< In 
omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum genus est 
infortunii fuisse felicem et non esse." 

4— T. R. 



50 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



The pernicious dispute that arises periodically 
concerning the comparative merit of Idealism and 
Realism is kept alive through the ill-advised ad- 
mission that such distinction in art exists. Here 
is a quarrel de lana caprina. There is neither 
Idealism nor Realism as these terms are com- 
monly understood. We have true art, which, in a 
certain sense, may be called Idealism, and a spuri- 
ous art, which is this Realism. Art of any spe- 
cies is a revolt against the commonplace, against 
the anarchy and injustice that man puts into ordi- 
nary life. The artist is forever striving toward 
beauty and its concomitants; he endeavors to com- 
pose material presented by Nature into forms 
more beautiful than those that fill his everyday 
world. He takes many images and fuses them 
into one, giving life to this single resulting cre- 
ation. If he is a great artist, he makes this ficti- 
tious creation real, alive. Recognition of that 
reality, but not of its full meaning, has given rise 
to what has been perverted into modern Real- 
ism. Whether a model is reproduced literally, or 
its copy is wrought better than itself, makes no 
difference, so far as the aesthetic quality is con- 
cerned, — except in so much as the notion of 
degree is considered; creation is always more 
valuable than a plaster-cast, but the literal copy 
and the new creation may both be art. The Ideal- 
ist creates, and his creation must be expressed 
with the realism of life as it is and prescinding 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 51 

from the notion of art. The Realist holds in 
theory, but not in practice, that the artist should 
copy existing models, and stop at that. We have 
here a leap to a conclusion for which there is 
no justifying premise; and the opinion, instinc- 
tive or reasoned, of all great artists is against the 
doctrine of the Realist. The error of confusing 
Romance with Idealism makes the question more 
difficult of comprehension by the Realist. Ro- 
mance is idealistic to a great extent in the choice 
of material, and, if good, it is realistic in expres- 
sion. Realism, in any case, has to do with expres- 
sion, not with subject-matter. It is like a mould, 
it touches its model; therefore it tends toward 
materialism, and usually neglects spirituality, in 
which is the highest beauty. 

* * * 

The poet as seer wanders through the world 
storing his mind with wisdom and with a million 
forms of beauty; then he turns to his treasury of 
memories, and taking two or a hundred beautiful 
things he gives them to his imagination and intel- 
lect to mould into a new creation that is one and 
vivified. Again, he stands rapt in the actual pres- 
ence of Nature and he interprets her hidden mean- 
ing for us. Whether they go down into the abyss 
of man's soul or up above the Rose of the Blessed 
for the marble they hew into new beauty, all great 
poets work alike, yet all work in different lines, 



52 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



for each was sent with a special revelation. Even 
God Himself works like other poets, and He has 
deigned to set a strange model for the artist. His 
Intellect looked in upon His own Essence as if 
upon a divine imagination, and from the totality 
of its infinite beauty-forms He moulded a single 
work, et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis! 
There was the expression; and in the night at Beth- 
lehem went out the tiny cry of a new-born babe. 
Like Charoba in Gebir at the first sight of the 
sea, we ask, <( Is this the mighty ocean ? Is this 
all* ? Yes, all. One narrow cry, yet we hear the 
height and the depth of God's master-poem, we 
know the limits of God as an artist. 

* * * 

Created beauty is loosely said to consist in the 
manifold in unity, il piu neW uno ; God's beauty 
is His infinite perfection. Infinity is the highest 
unity, and in a certain sense it carries the notion 
of multitude beyond limit. The beauty of a spirit 
other than God, as the human soul, is, I think, 
multitude in simplicity rather than multitude in 
unity, since its perfection lies more in simplicity 
than in mere unity, and this multitude in simplic- 
ity is not a paradox when rightly understood. 
Simplicity in spirits not divine is a shadow of 
God's unity wherein is the highest beauty. God's 
multiplicity, which is a relative, not an absolute 
attribute, is simultaneous; the soul's multiplicity, 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 53 

also relative, is consecutive. Our spirit acts so 
rapidly that it appears to do two things at once, 
but this is not really the case. It understands, 
then wills. True, it wills, and is simultaneously 
the principle of the complicated metabolism of the 
body, but in the office of vital principle it acts by 
its mere presence, as it were, not as dividing its 
spiritual action. Unity is the quality- in matter 
that reflects spiritual simplicity, and by unity is 
not meant mere individuality. An harmonious 
color-chord or a sound-chord are practically as 
simple, through unity, as a single color or a single 
note, and these chords have the additional charm 
of multiplicity. Rich single tones are rich by mul- 
tiplicity of overtones, and so for rich single colors. 
The juxtaposition found in the multiplicity of ma- 
terial beauty is the correlative of the consecutive 
activity in spiritual beauty. There are, then, 
three grades of beauty, of which the third and 
lowest, or material beauty, is a reflection of the 
second, which is spiritual beauty; and the second 
is a reflection of the Divine Beauty. 

if. if. if. 

Truth and goodness should first be partially 
considered, that beauty may be more intelligible. 
Things are true because they agree with the in- 
tellect that created or uttered them. Every actual 
entity is in absolute unison with its model in 
s rr.ind. He is all-wise, free, almighty, and 



54 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



everything that is must be what it is seen, willed, 
and made to be by Him. 

« God is the perfect poet, 
Who in creation acts His own conception." 

Even our feeble creations are true, so far as they 
agree with the pre-conceived ideas of them in our 
souls. That (( the promise still outruns the deed }> 
does not overset this doctrine. 

« Our whitest pearl we never find, 
Our ripest fruit we never reach ; 
The flowering moments of the mind 
Drop half their petals in our speech." 

The petals, however, that we do see are true. 
Falsity in actual things is nothing; it is a mere 
reason-concept predicated of our creations. A 
poem is loosely said to be false that halts short of 
the beauty in the poet's soul; a portrait is untrue 
that gives only half the man, part of what may be 
seen in his outward semblance, but this means 
merely that the full truth is not expressed. False- 
hood in its radical meaning has to do with will or 
judgment, not with being. 

Again, all that is, is good at the heart of it, 
from an Archangel to Lucifer. Being in reference 
to an intellect, is the true; in reference to a will, 
it is the good. Truth and goodness are not reali- 
ties superadded to being; they are relations to an 
intellect and a will, yet these relations are not a 
mere color d'erba che viene e va. The uttermost 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 55 

star is in the central hollow of God's hand, and 
He never sleeps. His intellect forever turns its 
infinitude of light as fully upon the nucleus of a 
plant-cell as upon the immensity of Himself — (< I 
know My own. 8 All things that ever have been, 
that are, that will or may be, in their entity, are 
terms of the Divine Will, which wished or can 
wish to give them existence; hence the very es- 
sence of the good is found in every created being 
as in the one uncreated Being. 

All things, however, are not equally good. The 
question of perfection enters here. Each being 
considered in itself has a certain degree of per- 
fection which constitutes its intrinsic goodness; it 
is, moreover, good in its own regard, or with re- 
gard to something else. The perfect is, etymolog- 
ically, that which is fully made, and a being has 
perfection because it is either complete, fully made, 
in itself, or it makes for perfection by contributing 
toward the completion, adornment, of some other 
entity. That which gives perfection, complete or 
partial, to a thing is the good; and, as such, the 
good is an object of will-appetence. 

There is a propensity or positive tendency in 
every will toward the good which is an end for 
the wili-adorned being, and this tendency is called 
appetence; — rational appetence when the eliciting 
knowledge comes through the intellect, sensible 
when it comes through the senses. Once again, 
the true is an object under the white light of the 



56 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

intellect, the good is the same object under the 
light, red if you like, of the will. 

Now, the intellect looks at various objects and 
it stops at one that it finds to be unusually com- 
plete, perfected, very good. This object has a 
rounded, flawless, full unity with coordinated vari- 
ety, although the intellect may not clearly see all 
that, and the appetence of the intellect is satisfied, 
set at rest, by the conformity of this object with 
its own nature which delights in moulding the sin- 
gle judgment out of coordinated variety in terms. 
Secondly, this completed good, root, stem, and 
blossom, is presented to the will which recognizes 
it as good, but as good not needed for the will's 
own perfection; and the will-appetence, which is 
awakened by good in any shape, rests after mere 
contemplation in this case. That particular good 
is worth looking at for sheer pleasure of looking, 
prescinding from any notion of having. Such good 
is the beautiful. 

There may be a will tendency toward this good, 
but it is a tendency halting in the first wonder of 
contemplation. Beauty is a cause of love, but not 
by any means so potent a cause as goodness. We 
may be surrounded by beauty and remain very 
slightly affected ethically. This seems paradoxical, 
since beauty is perfected good. We can love a 
beautiful object for the good in it below the beau- 
tiful, especially when the good is not spiritual, but 
in the presence of the higher beauty we stop con- 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 57 

tent in the vision; indeed, we always love beauty 
more because it is good than because it is beauti- 
ful. A beautiful face with no good behind it never 
held love. Beauty, then, is goodness with the gla- 
mour of a fuller perfection upon it, the bush crowned 
with a rose which untouched beyond our neighbor's 
hedge delights us. And the very practical conclu- 
sion to be drawn from all this dry metaphysics is 
that art which lacks truth and goodness is not art. 

* * * 

Art is not nature, it is an elevation of nature; 
it is the sister of sanctity. <( Be ye perfect as my 
heavenly Father is perfect, )y is its constant warn- 
ing-cry. True art exalts nature, false art indulges 
natural instincts. True art is ascetic, restrained; 
false art is sentimental or sensual. The Saint 
makes heroic efforts toward possession of the su- 
preme good, the real artist makes heroic effort 
toward possession of the supreme beauty. There 
are pain and delight in heroic effort. The Saint 
holds the flesh in check, because the flesh clouds 
the vision; the artist holds the flesh in check for 
exactly the same reason, since the supreme beauty 
is not more in the flesh than is the supreme good. 
Art has by no means reached the clear air of 
the mountain-top, even when Shakspere was its 
standard-bearer. Saint Paul was a man with great 
natural capability for the grace of sanctity; Shaks- 
pere was a man with great natural capability for 



58 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

the gift of art; Saint Paul, however, probably 
went farther in sanctity than Shakspere went 
in art, because Saint Paul held the flesh better in 
leash. 

The artist will grope, perhaps forever; his path- 
way is not clear as is the pathway of the saint, 
because the natural tendency toward the good is 
deeper, more valuable, than the natural tendency 
toward the beautiful, and on that account, perhaps, 
God has made the pathway toward the good clearer 
for man. We must make the good, true or false, 
our own; we may not make beauty our own, be- 
cause the very essence of beauty is perfected good- 
ness and truth contemplated. No one doubts that 
high goodness is of the spirit, few believe that high 
beauty is of the spirit; hence, the groping. True 
art would descend upon the earth were all artists 
convinced that beauty is spiritual. Then the world 
might evolve an artist far greater than Shaks- 
pere, who is the perfect artist as the doctrine of 
art now stands, which makes beauty part spirit, 
part slime. There is, however, no more hope for 
this conversion of the artists than there is for a 
general conversion of sinners toward sanctity. 

Should art, then, be moral? Yes, positively; 
never anything else than moral, when you under- 
stand the meaning of the word morality, which 
by no means is indicative of sentimentality and 
Gothic vestments. It is the only correct motive 
force for every breath and step. It has to do 



ART LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 59 

with God, and God is the only thing in the world, 
and over the world, and under the world, day 
and night, year in and year out, forever and for- 
ever. The artist may doubt this statement now, 
but he will not doubt it a second after the death- 
rattle. 

But, he objects, the spirit is abstract; art is con- 
crete. In the first place, the spirit is no more ab- 
stract, in the sense in which he uses the term, 
than is his pencil. It is not an adequation, a 
quality, an accident. While we are in the body 
here on earth we must use images. It is easy, 
pleasant, to receive impressions through images, 
and art must not be painful in its communicating, 
however painful it be in its production. Spiritual 
beauty, nevertheless, can be presented by images 
just as well as material beauty up to that degree 
at which we are forced to halt, not so much for 
lack of images as for lack of power to understand 
the spirit. Then, it is a grave error to think that 
art must consist in images, must be sensuous, as 
all the critics hold, accepting this valuable doctrine 
of Milton literally. The modern custom of swal- 
lowing in their entirety assertions fed to us by 
great men has been the cause of much moral in- 
digestion. There will be higher art in the next 
life than any we can dream of here, and it is cer- 
tain we shall not .use images there, at least until 
after the resurrection, and I doubt we shall need 
them then. 



60 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

There is the particular danger in the artistic 
temperament to stop content in expression of vir- 
tue without going on into act in which alone 
virtue consists. 

«E disiar vedeste senza frutto." 

The artist can speak of the beauty and loveliness 
of charity until his own eyes grow misty and the 
hearts of his hearers quicken, but on the way home 
from the lecture he will pass a beggar heedlessly 
because it is so troublesome to unbutton one's 
overcoat to get at a purse. The artistic conscience 
often is largely in emotions, but it is satisfied and 
lulled to sleep with vivid images and tears; and 
there is nothing in the spiritual life more worthless 
than tears. One moment of hard, rational deter- 
mination to avoid sin is worth a saucerful of tears. 

* * * 

A painter makes a portrait by selecting the 
comparatively few individualizing lines in a given 
countenance, and all artists work in the same 
manner. Real history also is produced by a like 
method, and the historian should be an artist that 
selects and arranges the material furnished to 
him; if he follows dates he is a mere chronicler. 
Shakspere put Cordelia's whole soul into a hun- 
dred lines, so that we know her perfectly, and 
historians should learn this craft. One cannot 
compress the facts of a thirty-years' war into a 
volume that may be read in a day, unless there is 



ART, LITERATURE AND BEAUTY 6 1 

a very judicious selection. By trying to tell 
everything historians usually tell nothing. They 
must learn to pick out the portrait-lines. We 
make a great mistake when we think that any 
patient scholar can become an historian. Histo- 
rians and poets are born and partly made. 

* * * 

We always see the beautiful in art darkly 
through at least two glasses, sometimes through 
three or even four. The artist creates the beauty 
in his own mind; he next passes it through the 
dark glass of his own faculty of expression, then 
we let it pass through the darker receiving glass 
of our faculty of comprehension, that varies in 
density as men vary. If the art is dramatic, the 
beautiful passes first out through the poet's ex- 
pression into written words, then into the actor's 
soul through the actor's power of receptivity, that 
differs as men differ, then out through the actor's 
power of expression, then, fourthly, into the minds 
of the audience, through hundreds of varying re- 
ceptive lenses. How little of the original sunlight 
should be left when the ray enters the last cham- 
ber! And when it does enter as a flame into this 
last chamber, as sometimes happens, how glorious 
must it not have been in the artist's mind before 
any attempt at expression! 



LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP 



63 



LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP 



ipgiGH love and familiarity are bitter enemies. 

ct^fe * * * 

(( Chi puo dir com' egli arde e in picciol fuoco," 
said Petrarch, who never learned what love is. 
The deeper the love is the easier it is to tell it; 
words are entirely unnecessary. Comprehension by 
the beloved is altogether another thing, which 
depends on the love felt by the beloved for the 

lover. 

* * ♦ 

Here on earth we are close to our friends as 
the roots of trees are close to one another; then 
comes death, and for a while, like the trunks of 
the trees, we are separated ; but presently we meet 
above as do the sunlit boughs. 

♦ * * 

A common error is to confuse our complacency 
in receiving affection with love for the person 
that gives that affection. Many women marry un- 
der this error. 

5-T. R. 65 



66 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Natural love feeds upon illusion, supernatural 
love upon reality. Give reality to the former and 
it starves; give illusion to the latter and it dies. 

* * * 

The Abbe Roux asked, (( What is love }) ? and he 
answered, (< Two souls and one flesh. B Love is 
anything but that! It is one soul and no flesh. 
Jelalu-D-Din told us long ago that the counter- 
sign at the door of Love when he asks, <( Who 
goeth there » ? is not, « It is I » ! but, « It is thy- 
self » ! 

* * * 

He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that 
changes an old love for a new. 

* * * 

If you intend to use a horse a whole day and 
a love for a lifetime, keep the reins taut in the 

morning. 

* * * 

A man that is deeply in love with himself will 
probably succeed in his suit owing to lack of 

rivals. 

* * * 

The consolation offered in sorrow by certain 
good-hearted friends is like dusting a chronom- 
eter's works with a broom. 

He * * 

Two women exchange confidence in the first 
person, two men in the third. 



LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP 67 

One should not even in jest be discordant with 
the beloved. This is a part of the sanctity of 

love, not morbidity. 

* * ♦ 

Love, art, and sanctity have the same funda- 
mental laws. The principles of unity, complete- 
ness, selection, and dignity are identical for the 
three. The unity of the manifold in love is won- 
derfully like the unity of the manifold in beauty, 
but love differs from beauty in having the super- 
added note of a desire for possession. Love is the 
beautiful with its quality of goodness so predomi- 
nant that it excites a will-appetence, and its qual- 
ity of truth so marked that it satisfies the intellect. 
This constitutes real or spiritual love, which is 
unchangeable. Physical love is changeable be- 
cause the truth and goodness therein are hollow, 
as are all material things. 

* # * 

Love between a man and a woman of equal 
mind is like fluid in a U-tube, — always at a level 
in the two arms. Great love on one side and lit- 
tle love on the other exists only in novels. There 
can be one-sided physical love, but that is not 
worthy the name love. 

* * * 

There is a subtle connection between love and 
truth, as there is between love and beauty, because 
the chief sin against love is deceit. 



68 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

A man that is not just and humble is incapable 

of deep friendship. 

* * * 

When there is real cause for jealousy between 
lovers, selfish animal love in the injured party 
gains the ascendency and excludes the essential 
diffusiveness of genuine or spiritual love, if this 
rare genuine love ever existed in the special in- 
stance. Where there is no real cause for jealousy, 
as in the case of Othello, the jealousy is always 
the effect of base mistrust and selfishness. The 
selfishness is often disguised under forms of jus- 
tice and honor. Othello's jealousy was altogether 
probable, but the Moor never loved Desdemona 

with real love 

* * * 

God is the only lover that has a right to be 
jealous, because His perfections are infinitely su- 
perior to the perfections of any other being, and 
divided love in His case is an insult. That is the 
reason a man may love his wife or child only in 
God. Christian love must be only a phase of love 
for God, and it is therefore infinitely deep. The 
natural passion called love has no element what- 
ever of genuine love in it; it is intense selfishness 
even where it exists between a mother and child. 
That a mother gladly sacrifices life for a child 
through natural affection is merely a subtle form 
of selfishness: she chooses an evil less painful to 
herself than the evil of seeing the child suffer. 



CHARITY, OBEDIENCE, HUMILITY 



6 9 



CHARITY, OBEDIENCE, HUMILITY 



fHARiTY is like the object-glass of a telescope — 
the broader you make it here on earth, the 
farther you can see into heaven. 

* * * 

It is strange that freedom is a mere effect of 
right servitude. We boast of our freedom, whereas 
the proudest boast is : (< I am a slave of God >} ! 

* * * 

Obedience made the difference between Michael 
and Lucifer, nay, in a certain sense, between 

Christ and Lucifer. 

* * * 

The chief evil of society is not so much a lack 
of faith as a lack of charity. 

* ♦ * 

Confidence is not an autumnal flower. 

Hs %i Hs 

The virtues are a chaplet of pearls whose two- 
stranded cord is made of pleached obedience and 
charity. 



72 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Be mindful of humility: the gale that breaks 
the pine does not bruise the violet. 

* * * 

A youth's knowledge, like the cheap muskets 
sold to savages, is liable to go off at half-cock, or 
burst, and damage bystanders or its owner. 

* * * 

Love and obedience are so closely related that 
one may be the cause of the other. 

* * * 

Love is a ray of white light, and obedience its 
spectral iris beyond the prism. The prism is 

God's will. 

* * * 

There is no rebellion in God, but there is in- 
finite obedience notwithstanding He is the Master. 

* * * 

Our Lord thought so much of obedience that it 
cost Him His life. He nailed Himself to a cross, 
as block is clamped to block, so that He could not 
disobey our commands. 

sjs Sfc H* 

Envy is the pace-maker for success in the race 

of life. 

* * * 

If you would find out whether a man is really 
modest, censure his work. 



CHARITY, OBEDIENCE, HUMILITY 73 

If you preach yourself you will gain yourself, 
and that for all eternity; but it is to be doubted 
that your prize will be worth the labor. 

* * * 

When a man makes a great mistake in life, he 
says, <( I was a fool ! }> and he thinks the earnest- 
ness of this confession atones for the foolishness. 

* * * 

If you would sound the depth of a man's faith, 
let fall your plummet into his charity; one is the 
measure of the other. 

* * * 

Hold up a dandelion-tuft and puff its arrowlets 
down the wind; spring will find the sward strewn 
with (( harmless gold." Do a deed of charity here, 
and you will awake after the winter of life to find 
your pathway strewn with eternal flowers. 

* * * 

Some poisons have more than one antidote, and 
an excellent secondary antidote for pride is obedi- 
ence. 

Pride is a splinter in the flesh, festering and 
painful till we pluck it out. 

* * * 

Any strong man can fight Blame, but only a 
saint can fight Praise. 



74 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

" One grain of rice 
Shoots a green feather gemmed with fifty pearls ; » 

and one deed of charity planted here will be a 
laden rose-tree in the garden of Christ. 

* * * 

Narcissus starved to death gazing in rapture at 
his own face reflected in a pool. Our hearts are 
starving through like foolishness, and we have not 
Narcissus' excuse of compelling beauty. 

* * * 

Humility is a state of mind in which we get 
the grace to quit lying to ourselves. 

* * ♦ 

Boards of public charity were invented by the 
devil to prevent real individual charity. 

* * * 

God have mercy on the man that thinks he has 
done his duty when he has paid his poor-tax! 

* * * 

The charitable man is like an apple-tree: he 
gives his fruit and is silent. The philanthropist 

is like a hen. 

* * * 

It has been said that the Blessed Virgin's great- 
est grace consisted in her perfect response to 
grace. This is merely another name for obedi- 
ence. 



CHARITY, OBEDIENCE, HUMILITY 75 

The most effectual prayer ever made is a coin 
put for God's sake in the poor-box. 

■% •%. •$£ 

If you have no charity your soul is not much 
better than a disinfectant — it serves only to keep 
your body free from the action of bacteria. 

* * * 

Thomas a Kempis says the gate of heaven is so 
low that only children enter there. 

jfc * ♦ 

The pronoun (( I }) has credit so poor that it is 
believed only when it speaks ill of itself. 

* * * 

You boast that you have good blood in your 
veins, — so might a mosquito boast. 

* * * 

We write learned works on social problems, on 
the struggle between capital and labor, on the 
negro question, on poverty in great cities, and the 
like, but the full and only solution is in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount. 

* * * 

Indiscriminate charity may be unwise, but Saint 
Benedict left this rule: (< First, relieve the poor; 
then, if need be, question them." Better to feed 
five hundred rascals than once to miss Christ in 
disguise. 



76 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Do not be proud; because if all fools wore 
white hoods, any crowd of men would look like a 
buckwheat-field in blossom. 

* * * 

There is no argument so hard to answer as a 
deep sneer — it is stronger than ridicule because 
it frightens us by its savagery. 

* * * 

All the aristocratic families of Europe trace 
back their descent to some successful mediaeval 
prize-fighter; many of ours to colonial Tories or 
transported convicts. It is a poor wine that age 

will not make good. 

* * * 

Wordsworth's words, 

« Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride, 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels," 

make one of the best mottoes in English literature, 
because the doctrine leads up to that word of Christ 
wherein is the whole law. 

* * * 

The little, half-heard overtones of kindness in a 
good man's life are what make the whole tone 
sweet and deep under the stroke of God's hand. 

* * * 

A perjurer lies in words, a vulgarian lies in 
deeds. 



CHARITY, OBEDIENCE, HUMILITY yy 

A cricket under a blade of grass commonly 
makes more noise than a yoke of oxen; and if the 
noisy cricket is human, it deceives us so much that 
at times we think it really worth more than an ox. 

* * * 

If you steal a spoon from your host the world 
calls you a thief; but if you add treachery to 
thieving and steal his reputation with a jest, the 
world calls you a wit. 



PATIENCE AND SORROW 



PATIENCE AND SORROW 



(gj|oRROw like rain makes roses and mud. 
*^jp> * * * 

When we plead for death we really desire a 

fuller life. 

* * * 

Possess your soul in peace. A wind-ruffled pool 
reflects no star, and a passion-ruffled soul reflects 
not the image of God. 

* * * 

The noblest souls are sad, the ignoblest are mel- 
ancholy; and cattle and some men are never sad. 

* * * 

Our hearts must be balanced on an agate-edge 
for the weight of a mustard-seed tips them from 

laughter to tears. 

* * * 

A coal fire softens pig-iron, and sorrow softens 
a man's heart -^ at least so say puddlers and senti- 
mentalists; but both these things usually cool to 
the original hardness. 

£— T. R. 81 



82 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Jacob did not have the vision of the ladder and 
the angels until he had laid his head upon a pil- 
low of stone. 

* * * 

That the world is so bare and hollow, is the 
reason that our laughter has ever a lack of satis- 
fying resonance in it. 

* * * 

There are void places in the night sky, but if 
we gaze patiently the stars will float out and fill 
them; and if we gaze patiently at our sorrow, God 
Himself will come into it with His beauty. 

* * ♦ 

Sorrow may be a good thing for a woman's 
heart, but it is a very poor cosmetic for her face. 

* * * 

Death is an antidote for this life, and it makes 
another more stable form of life which is also in- 
soluble in everything. 

* * * 

We are outside the garden of God's will when 
we begin to find the thorn Disappointment. 

* * * 

When our crosses come, instead of carrying them 
away reasonably we make others and pile these 
above the heavy load already placed upon us. We 
are like the famous maiden Jocrisse that drowned 
herself to escape the rain. 



PATIENCE AND SORROW 83 

The patient heart is a willow, the impatient 
heart a dry reed; when the storm of sorrow comes 
the reed breaks but the willow yields and recovers. 

* * * 

All good in this life is gold mixed with quartz, 
— we shall find the pure metal only after the ore 
has been crushed in the mill of death. 

* * ♦ 

The heart is a lake which in spring is covered 
with drifting petals, shadows of swallows, and bits 
of azure sky; in winter with ice. 

* ♦ ♦ 

It is in our autumn when 

8 The meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

Flowers are very common in the spring of youth; 
they are not valued till we find them rare among 

fallen leaves. 

* * ♦ 

We see a robin withdraw herself from her little 
ones to provoke them to fly after her. God does 
the same thing with us, and then we foolishly call 

our state Desolation. 

* * * 

If we leave our graves quiet under God's sun 
and rain, He clothes them with grass and flowers; 
and if we leave our sorrows quietly under the 
light and storm of His will, He makes His grace 
blossom thereon in beauty. 



84 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

We are like bricks, made of clay; and we are 
not fit for use in the City of God until we have 
been shaped in the mould of His will, and have 
been burned in the fires of affliction. ' 

* * ♦ 

The planets reflecting at night a departed sun 
are like recollections of joy in sorrow. 

* * * 

It is very easy to be a Stoic when the sun 
shines, and to despise the world when your purse 
is empty. 

* * * 

There is no sound reason for despondency: at 
the end of the Miserere comes the Gloria; at the 
edge of the crossed desert are the green grass and 
the music of running waters; April follows winter, 
the passion ended in the resurrection; after earth 

comes God. 

* * * 

Around the Great Salt Lake is a beach one 
hundred feet above the present strand, and flowers 
blossom where once was an overwhelming sea of 
bitter waters. If we wait patiently, our bitter 
waters will subside and the flowers of peace will 

blossom. 

* # * 

Each glad chord struck from our hearts by the 
hand of Time has all its harmonics in a sad minor 
key. 



PATIENCE AND SORROW 85 

We say this life is empty; yet within one half- 
hour we might see the beauty of a taper-flame 
in a dimly lit church, and the grace of a moving 
railway engine's gray plume, and the marvel of 
bare black boughs in the rain, and hear the music 
of a glad boy's whistle. 

* * * 

Like an old woman that goes from room to 
room searching for her spectacles that are pushed 
up on her forehead, we walk all over the world 
looking for the peace which God has so set that 
our feet are constantly stumbling against it. 

* * * 

During the sunshine a salty breeze blows from 
the sea toward the land; during the darkness a 
breeze laden with flower-perfume blows from the 
land out to sea, and during sorrow we send out 
our most fragrant prayers toward eternity. 

* * * 

Sensuality, spiritual sloth, pride, lack of faith, 
hope, and charity, are some of the causes of mel- 
ancholy. Dante, therefore, thrusts the melancholy 
into the slime of the dead canal of Styx, and there 
they cry out: 

"We sullen were, 
In the sweet air, which by the sun is gladdened, 
Bearing within ourselves the sluggish reek ; 
Now we are sullen in this sable mire." 



86 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

What is there in sorrow, on earth at least, that 
makes it better than joy ? We are pleased with 
comedy, we delight in tragedy. All great poetry 
is sorrowful ; all great poets are sorrowful — Shaks- 
pere, Dante, Firdousi, JEschylus, Camoens, are 
normally sorrowful. If we knew Homer we would 
find the law true for him also. All great music, 
painting, sculpture, are sorrowful. Christ and His 
mother were steeped in sorrow. We were re- 
deemed with sorrow, and if joy were better than 
sorrow we should have been redeemed with joy. 
We, however, delight only in imitated sorrow, be- 
cause we are naturally satisfied with sham, as we 
naturally prefer the world to God. Love for real 
sorrow is supernatural; it is one of the great 
graces of- the redemption. Only in eternity is joy 
better than sorrow. We have no right to eternal 
joy unless we pay for it, and grief is the price of 
joy. God, Who owes us nothing, wills this. 



GOD AND RELIGION 



87 



GOD AND RELIGION 



>n evil thought in a soul is like a water-rat 
swimming in a pond at evening: the rat 
destroys the iridescent reflection of heaven in the 

water. 

* * * 

The service of God resembles the window of a 
cathedral, — dull, bleak, ugly, without; but if we 
go within we find a blaze of beauty. 

* * * 

Thank God for His Immensity, because He can- 
not get away from us if He would. 

* * 4c 

I think that only very passionate persons become 

great saints. 

* ♦ * 

We should die like the stars — into day, not 

into night. 

* * * 

A Christian seeking revenge is exactly like a 
man that bites a cur because the cur had bitten 
him. 



9 o 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



If you hold a visiting-card before your eye, it 
will shut out as much as would the Rocky Moun- 
tains; and if you keep a little prejudice near your 
heart, it may shut out the sight of God. 

* * * 

The Church is a Valkyr that bears on her saddle- 
bow into Valhalla those heroes that fall in battle. 

* * * 

We are like flies in a church window-pane, 
striving to reach freedom on the wrong side of 

the glass. 

* * * 

When God would change a man into a priest, 
He is obliged to take a paper bag and put the 
crown jewels into it. What wonder that this bag 
sometimes loses a gem. 

* * * 

Philosophers rack their brains for metaphysical 
arguments to prove the existence of God while 
there are pansies to prove it in every garden. 

* * ♦ 

The saint's soul is like plate glass: it lets God's 
will pass through with slight deflection; our souls 
are mirrors that let in God's will but cast it back. 

* * * 

If we practically believed in the presence of 
our Guardian Angels there would be more ladies 
and gentlemen in the world. 



GOD AND RELIGION 91 

If we valued eternity rightly we would gather 
up the crumbs of time as carefully as the priest 
gathers up with his paten the particles on the 
corporal during the communion. 

* * * 

A drop of wine clinging to the inner side of a 
chalice will slip into the wine below at the touch 
of the priest's hand. Thus should our hearts slip 
into God's heart at the touch of .grace. 

* * * 

<( There, w said the young man on the bicycle to 
his girl companion, as they rode across a railway 
on Sunday morning, <( there is the locomotive that 
has killed four men." 

(< Bah >} ! said the bicycle, (( I'm killing entire 
churches and no one notices the fact." 

* * * 

If conscience lacks courage it is a legless para- 
lytic. 

* * ♦ 

When the ancients wished to quiet a wriggling 
conscience they spoke to it of fate; we talk of 

nature in like case. 

* * * 

When a babe sucks his thumb his mother puts 
quinine on it to wean him from this evil habit; 
and God has spread bitterness over the "good" 
things of the world for a like reason, but we 
make wry faces and still suck our thumbs. 



9 2 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



Immortality and a good drama are all in action. 
We shall live by our deeds, not by what we know 

and are. 

* * * 

To the rational man the coming- of death and 
sorrow is not the worst suspense — it is the ex- 
pectation of sin with its bitterness and contempt- 
ible foolishness. 

* * * 

A difference between a moralist at his twenti- 
eth birthday and one at his fiftieth, when consid- 
ering the old thesis, <( The Chief Good is not in 
riches, honor, nor learning, w is that at twenty the 
argument is studied but not felt, at fifty it is felt, 
— there is little need for study then. Experience 
is a fair professor of ethics. 

* * * 

The man that yields to sensuality with the in- 
tention of casting off the habit when it grows irk- 
some, is very like the man that hangs himself with 
a halter in a dark cellar in the trust that someone 
will cut him down in time to save life. 

* * * 

When we look at one of our sins we see only 
the froth and splash of the black stone that dropped 
into the pool of our soul — we do not notice the 
widening ripple that advances until it ends with 
the shore, disturbing every space, and distorting 
the image of the stars. 



GOD AND RELIGION 



93 



That old Mohammedan (< saint, M Ibnu'-s-Semmak, 
said a word that might be graven on the walls of 
any Christian church : w Fear God as though you 
had never obeyed Him, and hope in him as though 
you had never sinned against Him." 

* * ♦ 

It is strange that one of the chief uses of that 
mortal faculty, the Imagination, is to make easier 
for us a belief in Immortality. 

* * * 

In Laced^emon they threw misshapen babes into 
the cavern Apothetai; we should find an Apothetai 
for our misshapen thoughts, and preserve only 

those that are fair. 

* * * 

Christian marriage is an egoisme a deux per- 

sonnes. 

* ♦ ♦ 

Religion and poetry lie in the human heart like 
the corn discovered in the tomb of Pharaoh, and 
when the proper sunshine comes they grow like 

that grain. 

* * * 

Good habits are the soul's muscles — the more 
you use them the stronger they grow. 

* * * 

We are buried in the earth like seeds, and at 
the resurrection some will break through the soil 
as blossoms and many as weeds. 



94 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



When you are swimming shoreward through the 
waves of death you will find it better to have 
plunged into the waters without any load of sin. 

* * * 

Pascal said: <( Our religion is so divine that an- 
other divine religion is only the foundation of it." 

* * * 

The saint is one that without suffering from 
lacerated heart-strings can give up every love, 
from his cigar to his child. 

* * * 

A grave error at present is a tendency toward 
fatalism. Persons sin nowadays and say they can- 
not help their fall. They prate about heredity. 
They talk of their freedom in one breath and of 
their slavery to fate in another. Seneca said long 
ago : (( Nemo fit fafo nocens. w 

* * * 

On Chiabrera's grave in Savona are the words: 
<( Friend, while living I sought consolation on 
Mount Parnassus; do you, better advised, seek it 

on Mount Calvary. w 

* * * 

Children and the poor have waking dreams of 
the <( Good Fairy of Wishes, )} who fulfils their 
manifold longings. Grown children, too, and the 
rich have this fond dream; yet there is really a 
Good Fairy of Wishes, — God. 



GOD AND RELIGION 95 

If you cannot with filled eyes thank God for the 
wonderf illness of a pansy, yon are not an artist. 

* * * 

A man's appetence for the good is deeper than 
the drinking-horn of Thor, for God is the only 

wine that can brim it. 

* * * 

One of the chief miracles of the hidden life was 
the keeping of Saint Joseph for so many years 
from dying of love. 

The fnll moon on a still night is God's most 
ancient figure of the elevation of the Host. 

* ♦ * 

Historians tell ns that the Beautiful Gate of the 
Temple was destroyed, but we know that it was 
flung open forever by the head of Longinus' lance. 

* * * 

A man that turns to God in his old age reminds 
one of a babe that eats a peach and with profuse 
generosity offers its mother the stone. 

* * * 

Saint Benedict threw down an idol in a shrine 
of the Terra di Lavoro and set up an image of 
Christ. If the Saint came into our heart he would 
find a Pantheon to be overturned; yet, we resent 
the charge of idolatry, and subscribe money to 
convert the heathen in Asia. 



96 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

A crucifix is an image of Christ's body. This 
is a wide thought, bounded by the Trinity on one 
side and by hell on the other. 

* * * 

Like a nightingale's, God's music is sweetest in 

the dark. 

* ♦ * 

Sanctity does not consist in a bilious visage. I 
have known very holy monks that took a long 
rope in the waist, and who laughed sturdily and 

often. 

* ♦ * 

There is a fear of God that drives out sin, and 
a fear of God that causes scrupulosity and sadness c 
The first is a form of love, the second is a nerv- 
ous disease or a temptation, or a sin. 

Theologians say that in heaven we shall know 
our own. Yes, if we choose to think of them. 
God is enough, and every one will be our own in 

Heaven. 

* * * 

We are Danaids striving in foolish bitterness 
to fill our sieves with water when we could easily 
fill them with God; — a sieve dipped under the 

sea is full enough. 

* * * 

No man ever became bankrupt by the loss of 
time spent upon his knees. 



GOD AND RELIGION 97 

Archimedes said if he had a fulcrum whereon 
to set his lever he could move the earth. We 
have that lever, — prayer. We have the fulcrum, 
also, — Christ's promise; and we can move not 
only the world,- but God himself. 

* * * 

Why are persons who doubt that St. Peter was 
at Rome certain that Simon Magus was there ? 
And why do those who scoff at relics of saints 
keep General Jackson's smallclothes in precious 

cases ? 

* * * 

The devil grins when he persuades us that it is 
always (( in bad form w to speak roughly. 

* * * 

God's image is in every man, high or low, — a 
road puddle holds the moon as well as the sea. 

* * ♦ 

Success and virtue are not always twins. 

* * * 

A colony of tiny red ants started to burrow 
at the foot of Mount Shasta. (< Is this wise ? w 
asked one of them ; (( we may cause the mountain, 
which, after all, is beautiful, to tumble down. w 
The others answered solemnly : (< Let it fall ! }> 
This historical fact is kindly offered for the con- 
sideration of the Church's enemies. 

7— T. R. 



98 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

God is a good physician who is pitiful when we 

are delirious. 

* * ♦ 

A chief rule in the arithmetic of merit is that 
God's and his neighbor's opinion of a man is al- 
ways in inverse ratio to his own opinion of him- 
self. 

* * * 

God and a mother are bankers that pay out 

usurious interest. 

* * * 

In charitate perpetua dilexi te — we are eternal, 
and that in the very love of God; yet we can turn 
away to the love of — food. 

* * * 

Our system of book-keeping as regards the ac- 
count with God seems to be irregular. The Father 
gave us His only begotten Son. This Son gave us 
the last drop of His blood; and we give them in 
return a sleepy half-hour on Sunday morning, and 
think the ledger is balanced. 

* * * 

We sow nettles and we blame God because we 

cannot reap wheat. 

* * * 

The Church and heresy — Saturn and a billiard- 
ball; and the billiard-ball threatens to crack Sat- 
urn in the collision. 



GOD AND RELIGION 99 

Anger and gluttony are two very common sins 
that are seldom reproved. Old persons, especially, 
are frequently gluttonous, from the erroneous opin- 
ion that age requires more food than youth. 

There is nothing ugly in the world except sin; 
even an ulcer is hideous only to the ignorant — 
the pathologist and the bacteriologist find it won- 
derful. Roses grow on ragweeds if you look aright 
for them. 

The words Fortune, Chance, and Luck are in- 
ventions of the Father of Lies to discredit God's 

providence. 

* * * 

A humiliating proof of man's ignorance is that 
he is more deeply impressed by a miraculous clear- 
ing up of an eyeball or by the restitution of a bit 
of bone than by the conversion of a sinner. 

It is as easy to make a new planet as to reviv- 
ify a dead soul, yet souls are revivified every day. 
Therefore there is a God. 

* * * 

Virtue is a passion under a curb bit; it thus 
carries us safely into the City of God. Vice is the 
same passion with the bit in its teeth; it thus car- 
ries us into the ditch. 



ioo THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Our Lord delights in the conjunction of ex- 
tremes. He made us of slime and spirit. He 
united his Godhead with human nature; He is 
willing to unite even man with Himself. 

* * * 

Blessed are the holy nails of the cross which so 
wounded His feet that He cannot walk away from 

you and me! 

* * * 

The veil of the Temple was rent that the Holy 
of Holies might never again be hidden, but we in- 
sist on rehanging the veil of the flesh before the 
Holy of Holies which is the image of God in our 
souls, and some of us make very poor imitation of 
the high priest — we enter behind this veil only 
once a year, about Easter. 

* * * 

God's beauty is a string of pearls in the lake of 
the soul, and the lake must be limpid, that we 
may find the gems. Let the mud settle and do 

not stir it up again. 

* * * 

The world says, If you make chaff of yourself 
the cows will eat you; the saints say, Let them 

eat! 

* * * 

One of the wisest remarks Emerson ever made 
was : <( 'Tis curious that we only believe as deeply 
as we live." 



GOD AND RELIGION 101 

Inaccuracy in the use of words is a source of 
evil. For example, martyrs are made by the 
cause, not by the suffering, as men usually sup- 
pose; riches are spiritual things, not metals and 

acres of dirt. 

* * * 

We do not fear the corpse of a tiger, but many 
fear the corpse of a man with a mysterious dread. 
Why ? Because of the soul that has been therein, 
and which is known to be in existence after the 

coming of death. 

* * * 

The American clergyman once labored in God's 
vineyard exclusively, now he too often works out- 
side the wall. The American physician, however, 
owing to our remarkable medical laws, continues 
to labor in God's churchyard. 

* * * 

Some persons pray only when they foresee 
trouble coming. They are tree-toads that croak 

before a storm. 

* * * 

There is no small thing in the world. A few 
pus-cocci, of which a thousand could pass through 
the eye of a needle, got into Washington's throat 
and killed him in a week; an apple was eaten by 
a woman and hell was thronged; nay, God Him- 
self had to come down to turn the river of souls 
out of that pit. 



102 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Four thousand eight hundred ordinary bacteria 
could lie side by side on the head of a pin, and 
one of these bacteria may be a great oak-tree for 
some parasite upon which God turns His infinite 

intellect. 

* * * 

I think we shall find that heaven resembles a 
church in this particular : there will be more women 
there than men. Hell will, also, like a dramshop, 
have more men than women. 

* * * 

Conscience is a collector that presents the bills 

to passion. 

* * * 

A saint is not understood in his own day. He 
is like a hill touched with dawn while the valley 

is in darkness. 

* * * 

All sin is selfishness; all virtue is self-restraint. 

* * * 

The patience of God is like the Atlantic — it 
bears up a garbage-barge as well as a rotten 
apple; and as Chaucer said: (( If He ne hadde pite 
of mannes soul, sory songe mighte we alle singe. )} 

* * * 

Preachers that wonder at the failure of their 
work should remember that children will eat bread 
spread with sweets. 



GOD AND RELIGION 103 

A saint is like a young bird that sings at mid- 
night. The other birds cry: (< Hush, thou fool, 
the neighbors will be awakened w ! But God, sleep- 
less in His heaven, says : (( That was a sweet mel- 
ody » ! 

* * * 

A man that leaves virtue and then seeks peace 
is very like a stray chicken in the rain. The- 
coop is open before his eyes, but he blunders, 
piping sadly, all over the barnyard, and two angels 
could not drive him in the right direction. 

* * * 

The most abject pauper I ever knew was a mil- 
lionaire whose soul was starved to death. 

* * * 

Our will-tendencies or appetites are like water 
— they are ever ready to run into a cup. If the 
cup contains them they are at rest, if it is too 
small they spill over and remain in agitation. God 
is the only cup large enough to hold them. 

* * * 

The ease or difficulty with which we are scan- 
dalized is a test of our faith in the moral order, 
and of our common sense in the natural order. 

* * * 

Sanctity is a ruby at the bottom of the Dead 
Sea, and we must dive into the bitter waters if 
we would grasp it. 



104 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

It has become common of late to say that the 
management of the Church has passed from the 
hands of the monks into the hands of the secular 
clergy, but some old-fashioned persons think that 
the management is still in the hands of God. 

* * * 

You call that man a fool who ties up a ship 
with a pack-thread, and you say this while you 
are in the act of tying up your own soul with a 

hope for riches. 

* * * 

The ticking of a watch is a little thing but it 
beats out the lives of men. 

* * * 

Epictetus said : (< It is better by assenting to 
truth to conquer opinion, than by assenting to 
opinion to be conquered by truth, w but no man 
heeds him, except the saint, although we all are 
convinced that truth is the most merciless con- 
queror the world knows. 

* * * 

We must take the church as she is, with dust 
on the hem of her robe, since you and I are part 
of that dust. He that looks for absolute perfec- 
tion in this world is very young or a fool. If you 
want absolute perfection, separate the Church from 
her members and amuse yourself with that thin 
delight. 



GOD AND RELIGION 105 

An heresiarch attacking the Church is like a 
flea that says : <( Watch me smash this fellow }) ! 
and then jumps upon a man's back. The man 
does not know he is touched till he feels the thing 
crawling on his neck, then he half unconsciously 
brushes it off. 

Ox the first Good Friday the earth was a funeral 
car rolling through space. 

* * * 

Vicious dogs, deep water, bitter hatred, and real 

sanctity are all still. 

* * * 

If you look at a rain-filled hoof-print in a road 
you can see the soil below and also a reflection of 
the sky; and in every man's heart you can see the 
image of God and the earthliness below that. 

% * ♦ 

If you would have your memory last forever, 
build your monument in God's heart. 

♦ * * 

There is a spiritual color-blindness as there is a 
physical color-blindness. The rich, ruby-like tints 
of holiness are on that account a dirty brown to 

many persons. 

♦ * * 

Our souls are waves, and God's providence is 
the wind. 



106 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

The modern infidel looks upon the next life as 
the old French lady looked upon ghosts — she did 
not believe in them but she was afraid of them 

nevertheless. 

* ♦ ♦ 

The bitter waters of the Great Salt Lake evap- 
orate heavenward and fall in sweet rain, and our 
thoughts sent up to God are purified and fall into 
our hearts again in refreshing showers. 

* * * 

When hearts turn to God there comes first the 
warm April rain of consolation, next the summer 
of aridity when the grain is ripening, then the 
autumnal upgathering of the full sheaves. 

* * * 

The Church and the soul are athletes that grow 
stronger in times of resistance to opposing force 
and weaker in times of peace. 

* * * 

Do not mistake your dyspepsia for sanctity. 

* * * 

« Ut fuso taurorum sanguine centum 
Sic capitur minimo thuris honore Deus," 

said Ovid; and God is the greatest spendthrift — 
He buys one diseased human soul with all his 
blood, and a little scrap of human love with Him- 
self. 



GOD AND RELIGION 



107 



Judas sold our Lord for eighteen dollars and 
thirty-six cents; we sell Him to escape the gig- 
gling of a woman and then abuse Judas. 

* ♦ * 

It is said that the just man falls seven times a 
day. If we accept this small average literally he 
falls 127,750 times in fifty years. Fancy the mass 
of sin the habitual law-breaker can heap up in a 

lifetime! 

* * * 

Do good in the dark like the flower that blooms 
at night, — God can see. 

* ♦ * 

We are mere notes in a piece of music played 
by the angel Death — heard and lost; and if we 
do not sound discordantly all's well. 

* * * 

The chief characteristic of the angel Death is 
his contempt for flattery: he takes the man that 
the whole world worships and says : <( This fellow 
is really but a pinch of greasy slime and I'll 
prove it. 8 And he does. He tosses him by the 
heels into a box for a few days and then says to 
us : (( Now hold your noses and look at Sir Fine- 
Feathers » ! 

* * * 

It is easier to raise a stout oak in a hothouse 
than a stout-souled man in a house of wealth. 



108 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

The saint is the man that bears his own crosses 
as easily as you and I bear the crosses of our 

neighbors 

* * * 

Christ as priest and victim should have been 
without blemish, therefore He was even physically 

beautiful. 

* * * 

(< Es ist gut, in der Stille auf das Heil Gottes 
warten }) (Jeremiah, Lament, iii., 26), is an example 
of depth of meaning in a sound, — other transla- 
tions are weaker. 

* ♦ ♦ 

Creation is a complex system of orbits. If 
everything is kept within its orbit there is peace. 
Man and a railway engine are useless when off 

the track. 

* * * 

Pagan priests performed ceremonies with awed 
accuracy; Christian priests usually perform them 
inaccurately. The ceremony was the substance 
with the pagan, hence the special care; the cere- 
mony is not the substance with the Christian, 
hence the inattention. When words or actions 
become the substance in Christian worship the 
priest is accurate. God struck Oza with sudden 
death for carelessly touching the ark, but this was 
before the law of love went into effect, — men to- 
day presume upon that law. 



GOD AXD RELIGION 



109 



Michel Angelo said : <( He that wants more than 
leaves had better not go to May," but we all go 
to May for fruit, and then grow impatient at our 

failures. 

* * * 

Goethe and George Eliot both have this thought : 
<( Tell me what you laugh at and I shall tell you 

what you are." 

* * * 

Only men of the strongest faith should become 
scientists, because scientists so readily fall into the 
evil and vulgar habit of Didymus — they must 
touch everything. 

Sfi S§S Sf! 

Science is Truth with her wings clipped. 

* * * 

A man will say : (( If I had faith I would aban- 
don the world." Abandon the world and you will 
get faith. You cannot swim unless you go into 

the water. 

* * * 

When our Lord gave the proofs of His divinity 
to the disciples of the Baptist, these were : <( The 
blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, 
the deaf hear, the dead arise again, the poor have 
the Gospel preached to them." (Matt, xi., 5.) 
There is a growth toward a climax in this enu- 
meration, and the most wonderful fact is the last, 
— <( the poor have the Gospel preached to them." 



no THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Since a good divine is a good physician of souls, 
it seems strange that divines do not take up spe- 
cialties, as the physicians of the body adopt these. 
We might have spiritual oculists that would cure 
the concupiscence of the eyes, spiritual laryngolo- 
gists that would cure the vocal cords of the dis- 
ease of gossiping, and so on. 

* * * 

The modern infidel that . sneers at the miracles 
of the Bible sees nothing absurd in the ghosts in 
< Hamlet, > ( Macbeth, > < Richard III., 5 and < Julius 
Caesar,* and his heart leaps when Athene shouts 
beside Achilles in the trench. He delights in fic- 
titious miracles because his mental tendency is 
toward sham, just as his infidelity is sham; and 
because the heart must seek the supernatural in 
sham if it rejects it in reality. 



In the ( French Revolution ) Carlyle has these 
words : (( Freedom is the one purport wisely aimed 
at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, 
and sufferings on this earth. w There are three 
kinds of freedom: freedom of the will in the meta- 
physician's sense of the term; external or juridi- 
cal and political freedom; and freedom from the 
tyranny of passion. If we are free in the third 
meaning of the term, we are in possession of 
peace. 



GOD AND RELIGION in 

In the natural order a single trace of vulgarity 
in a man's character is infallible proof that we 
cannot evoke deeply refined thought from him, 
but this is not true in the supernatural order. 
God puts precious wine in very cheap vessels, and 
you can at times get no slight spiritual truth from 
the words of a man so thick-witted that he is ca- 
pable of setting up artificial flowers on an altar of 
God. 

* * * 

An instructive treatise might be written on path- 
ological religion. There is a fever which causes 
some Christians to fight the (( escaped priest w but 
prevents them from going to confession; there is 
a destructive mania which permits faithful attend- 
ance upon all church services but induces a chronic 
state of character-ripping; there is an epidemic 
megalomania which makes ignorant persons posi- 
tively certain they could write better sermons than 
those which the priest gives them; there is an oc- 
casional megalomania which causes some priests 
to think they are the Church; there is the <( night 
terror of children }> which is afraid of the devil 
who is very harmless when you know him; there 
is a state of neurasthenia which makes women 
and some editors jump up on a table whenever 
the enemies of the Church whisk their little tails 
across the floor; and a hundred other ills that 
flesh is heir to. 



112 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

Our Lord was with the Blessed Virgin at Beth- 
lehem, in Egypt, in Nazareth, in Jerusalem, on 
Calvary; He is with her in Heaven, and when 
any nation drives her out He follows her. The 
Church has recognized this association in the year's 
festivals. We have the feast of the Annunciation 
or Incarnation and the feast of the Immaculate 
Conception ; the two Presentations in the Temple ; 
the Baptism of our Lord and the Purification of 
the Blessed Virgin; the Passion and the Dolors; the 
Ascension and the Assumption; the Sacred Hearts, 

and so on. 

* * * 

We sometimes see pictures of the Crucifixion in 
which the Blessed Virgin is represented as in a 
swoon. Benedict XIV., in his book ( De Festis ) 
(lib. ii., cap. iv.), has an article on this subject in 
which he sets down as a proposition: (( We hold 
that neither under the cross, nor anywhere else, 
did the Blessed Virgin fall fainting. w In the 
course of his argument he gathers together the 
opinions of the great theologians upon the ques- 
tion. Ambrose, Peter Canisius, Suarez, Cajetan, 
Reynandus, Cornelius a. Lapide, Novatus, and oth- 
ers are with him in his assertion. 

* * * 

The heroes of the old Norse sagas all had this 
virtue: they could stand up, front to front, before 
man, dragon, norn, and god, and take a blow 



GOD AND RELIGION 1 13 

without cringing-. They knew that the strong man 

can cross the bridge Bifrost if he keeps fear in 

loathing. That spirit is the material for saints, 

for all sin is weakness. God loves a good fighter, 

and there is no peace this side of death, except in 

the imagination of the amiable old ladies who are 

so busy with the proceedings of their arbitration 

societies that they do not hear upon the streets 

below them the tread of soldiers going out to 

battle. 

* * * 

The diameter of the earth's orbit is 190,000,000 
miles. Take that as a base-line and strive to tri- 
angulate the distance of one of the fixed stars that 
make small light-specks on the blue arch over 
your head. You cannot get an angle of any kind. 
The star is so far away that the sides of this tri- 
angle are practically parallel; in other words 190,- 
000,000 miles in this relation is smaller than a pe- 
riod in type, — is a mere mathematical point. The 
vault up there, with its million systems of suns, 
is, as a Persian poet said, a bubble on the ocean 
of His immensity. What are we in that universe ? 
When a bacteriologist is examining a colony of 
bacteria he marks the glass over the clump so that 
he can find it again, and the angels would be 
obliged to do something similar to find a whole 
nation of us were it not for a first-class miracle, 
but we can be insolent in our prayers — one of us 
can. 

8— T. R. 



14 



THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 



In about four drops of blood there are five mil- 
lion red blood-cells and two thousand five hundred 
white blood-cells, besides other things. Under an 
ordinary oil-immersion lens one can see at times 
thirty to forty cholera bacilli within one of these 
white blood-cells. Now, one of these bacilli dropped 
into a proper medium could, in a few hours, fur- 
nish material enough to cause an epidemic of chol- 
era which would make a desert of all Europe if 
not checked. The mediaeval plagues were caused 
in this manner, if we except the ergot plagues 
and a few others. God does not require a wind- 
lass to lift our mighty selves into a place where 
we cannot be impudent. 

* * * 

The sin of despair always reminds me of the 
sin of Eve, — both are sins of stupidity. Think of 
Saint Austin who was a Manichean and a liber- 
tine, and afterward one of the greatest Doctors of 
the Church; of Saint Paul, the saint-slayer, who 
was rapt to the heaven of heavens; of Saint Peter 
who denied Christ before a kitchen-wench, but who 
as prince of the Apostles received the grace of cru- 
cifixion for the Master; of Saint Mary of Magdala, 
the street-walker, who had the hair with which 
she wiped our Savior's feet besprinkled with the 
precious blood on Golgotha; of Saint David, the 
lecherous suborner of murder, but who became a 
man after God's own heart; of Eve who flooded 



GOD AND RELIGION 115 

hell with souls but is now at the feet of the 

Madonna. There is some reason for the sin of 

presumption, but the sin of despair is the sin 

of a fool. 

* * * 

Sound is a mode of motion; light is probably a 
more rapid vibration in the same mode. In Heaven, 
therefore, we may hear color and light. It will 
be pleasant there to close our eyes and listen to 
the rounded symphony of each sunset and the sub- 
tle harmony of twilight — if, indeed, the haunting 
of God's beauty will let us hear. Every slight 
movement will shed a fragrance of melody. Often 
we shall grow faint with the ravishment of music 
leaping from the flash of our Lady's white hand. 
Oh, (< the ear of the heart is exquisitely fine ! w 
Yet we that are here athirst for music shall be 
satisfied, — nay, we shall be upheld by His right 
arm lest we die for the ecstasy of hearing. 

The billion glittering worlds we see on a sum- 
mer night are micrococci caught in the blood- 
corpuscle of our sky. This sky is one blood-cell 
of a giant who, in turn, is a speck of dust on 
God's sandal. You and I are very diminutive par- 
asites on one of the ultimate micrococci called the 
earth; yet we patronize God at times! Is not that 
a hideous jest ? We shall never grasp the entire 
width of this jest, but it should explain in part 



n6 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

the patience of God. God must use the micro- 
scope of His infinite intelligence to find us at all, 
and we think He owes us something. We are 
sublime through the enormity of our insolence. 

♦ ♦ ♦ 

The nearest fixed star, our next-door neighbor 
among these fixed stars, is Alpha Centauri, which 
is twenty-five trillion, two hundred and fourteen 
billion, four hundred million miles distant from 
your eye. Stand under one of the Yosemite preci- 
pices, which run up only three thousand feet, and 
the height is stupefying; but three thousand feet 
is a thousandth part of a turn on the finest microm- 
eter screw that an archangel could make, com- 
pared with the distance of Alpha Centauri. We 
do not know what one billion means; it is a mere 
mysterious sign. There is a star which is in front 
of our faces nearly every night, and the wisest of 
us cannot have the faintest conception of what so 
material a thing as its distance is, yet we pose be- 
fore God and discuss His justice. This is one of 
the reasons I have for saying that the difference 
between ourselves and lunatics is largely one of 
residence. 

>}C JjC }j? 

The light from the farthest stars that we see 
takes centuries to reach us, coming always at the 
rate of 186,330 miles a second. An angel may 
have pinched one of these between his finger and 



GOD AND RELIGION 117 

thumb and quenched it when Luther was (( re- 
forming B the Church, and the light would be 
pouring down on us yet. Stars which new off as 
sparks from God's anvil when Saint Michael was 
young will toss their light into a telescope for the 
first time the year before the general judgment, 
and the astronomer that will discover these stars 
will go to church the Sunday after the discovery 
and criticise loftily the sermon of another microbe 
who will talk without a quaver on the Incarnation 

of Christ. 

♦ ♦ ♦ 

When the end has come and all mankind have 
been gathered together that chose heaven or hell, 
God will say to the angels : (< Children, close the 
gates, and put out the little lights. B The stars 
will be extinguished, and then the last rays of the 
escaping light will spread, spread for the thou- 
sandth power of a trillion of miles and farther 
before they blend with nothingness; and this dis- 
tance is not the width of a blood-corpuscle com- 
pared with God's immensity, — is nothing at all. 
One of the most wonderful things in God, to the 
man who cannot appreciate more abstract attri- 
butes, is that He can see this tiny universe; and 
when we know that He turns His entire intellect 
upon one of us, that He shrank within a human 
body and had Himself killed for one of us, we 
must leave that to faith as we leave the mystery 
of the Trinity. Still we have novelists, female 



n8 THOUGHTS OF A RECLUSE 

novelists at that (God save the mark!), that write 
about His justice disapprovingly. 

* * * 

Sometimes it almost seems that the initial step 
toward the embrace of God is to have been a 
brutal sinner. God is the first mother: He can- 
not forget his (( black sheep " The world says : 
(( Lord, this will not do ! We must have regard 
for decency and justice. " 

He smiles and kisses the shuddering, diseased 
soul, and whispers : (( It is decent and just to save 
— I paid all debts with blood." 

<( But, Master, this encourageth crime " 

"Nay," He says, (( that needeth no encourage- 
ment; it cannot be worse. To cure the plague is 
not to spread the plague." 

<( But sin is different from disease," objects the 
World (who is without sin) ; <( the sinner hath free 
will." 

<( Yes, I know this free will, " he answers ; <( and 
I know of other things, — for example, I know of 
ignorance and of weakness in high places as well 
as in low places; but I know most of all that I 
love. I am God, but I cannot avoid this love 
because it is Myself." 



JU " is i m 



^ARTM^ 



t« 



^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

022 211 953 4 





